1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a controller remote-controlling a signal processing device which performs signal processing to an input signal by a plurality of processing elements and outputs the processed signal.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been conventionally known a digital mixer (hereinafter, simply referred to as a “mixer”) as a signal processing device which performs signal processing to audio signals inputted via a plurality of input channels, in a plurality of processing elements based on values of various parameters, and outputs the processed signals from a plurality of output channels. It has been practiced that a user is enabled to remote-control the operation of such a digital mixer with a PC (personal computer) by connecting the PC to the mixer and causing the PC to execute a desired program.
There has been known an art to provide a mixer and a PC with the following functions and cause them to perform the following operations.
First, it has been known that a current memory which stores values of parameters to be reflected in currently performed signal processing and a scene memory which stores, as a scene, a set of values of parameters used for controlling the signal processing are prepared in the mixer, and the mixer is provided with functions of storing the contents of the current memory as a scene in the scene memory, or recalling the contents of a scene in the scene memory to the current memory to reflect the called contents in the signal processing.
In this case, a current memory and a scene memory are similarly prepared in a work area prepared on a memory of the PC by a control program, thereby enabling a user to edit, on the PC, the values of the parameters used for controlling the mixer without connecting the PC to the mixer.
Further, when the PC and the mixer are connected and the transition to an online state is instructed, synchronous processing is performed to make the contents of the current memory and the scene memory on the PC side and those on the mixer side match each other. Further, in this online state, operation events are mutually transmitted to/from the PC side and the mixer side, and when some operation for changing the contents of the current memory or the scene memory takes place in either side, the same changes are made to the contents in the PC side and the mixer side, thereby maintaining the synchronization.
Further, it has been also known that when a request data is transmitted from the PC side to the mixer side, status data indicating a state of the mixer such as levels of currently processed signals and so on is transmitted from the mixer side to the PC side in response to the request, so that it is realized to display, in the PC side, the state of the mixer such as the signal levels at a desired point of a desired input channel and so on by utilizing the state data.
The above mixer and control program are described in, for example, “Studio Manager version 2 Owner's Manual” and “PM5D Editor Owner's Manual” by Yamaha Corporation.